Is this a monopoly on biz radio?

[NW0U]

In reasearching the 800 Mhz LTR systems in my area I took the great advice I received here by running a licensee's FRN thru the FCC lookup engine.

Holy Cow! It appears that Mobile Relay Associates, a Calif outfit, runs about 20 systems near Denver, CO.

When in doubt it might be worth simply trying that name in the database and in your State and see what you get.

[SkipSanders]

There never were a LARGE number of 'major providers' for radio systems at the hardware/site level for businesses.

For a while, there were multiple 'SMR' (early trunking) providers here in San Diego, but the general move by many businesses to Nextel group/direct comms has shrunken the pool of users down, and these days, there are only a few business trunking systems around to 'rent time' on, again.

Nationwide, it's probably the same, a shakeout of providers as Nextel/similar pulls users over into cellphone/PDA provided communications, leaving less need for rental trunking systems, or conventional repeaters. Thus, the dominance in the field of a relative few major players in this business.

[letarotor]

Recently discovered in our area that some pager licences are being used in LTR systems. This might explain why when you run the target frequency on the FCC database it doesn't pop up. Apparently, the pager freqs are in a range and not spot on, so it misses it when you do a search.

[letarotor]

Along the same line, I discovered a piece of paper today that I had written down some frequencys on in the past following an FCC database search. With the older versions of the FCC database, it seemed the information we received was much more reliable than what we get today. The newer versions (V3.*.*) are much less forthcoming when running frequencies as evidenced with the paper I discovered. Has anyone else noticed this when trying to do research?